There are thousands of stories with original beginnings. This is not one of them. I think the only way to start a story about contemporary life in California is to do it the way Jack London started The Sea-Wolf. I have confidence in that beginning.
It worked in 1904 and it can work in 1969. I believe that beginning can reach across the decades and serve the purpose of this story because this is California — we can do anything we want to do — and a rich young literary critic is taking a ferryboat from Sausalito to San Francisco. He has just finished spending a few days at a friend’s cabin in Mill Valley. The friend uses the cabin to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche during the winter. They all have great times together.
While travelling across the bay in the fog he thinks about writing an essay called The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.
Of course Wolf Larsen torpedoes the ferryboat and captures the rich young literary critic who is changed instantly into a cabin boy and has to wear funny clothes and have to take a shit off everybody, has great intellectual conversations with old Wolf, gets kicked in the ass, grabbed by the throat, promoted to mate, grows up, meets his true love Maud, escapes from Wolf, bounces around the damn Pacific Ocean in little better than a half-assed rowboat, finds an island, builds a stone hut, clubs seals, fixes a broken sailing ship, buries Wolf at sea, gets kissed, etc: all to end this story about contemporary life in California sixty-five years later.
Thank God.
—Richard Brautigan
March 14, 2009, 6:12pm
